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Dec 24, 2005
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ADVERTISEMENT:
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WORLDTECH wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
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INTERVIEWS for proofreading position for WORLDTECH's KOLKATA unit.

Only those with more than two years of experience and exposure to final
level proofreading need apply. Selected candidates will undergo three
months' orientation at Hyderabad. Compensation linked to merit and
performance alone. During orientation, food and accommodation will be borne
by WORLDTECH. Interviews will be held at Kolkata on December 26th and 27th.
Apply in confidence with details.

Contact: Venkat Nimmagadda, General Manager, HR, at Worldtech MGR
Estates, Saibaba Temple Road, Punjagutta, Hyderabad 500082.
Tel # 040-2335-2700/2698 or mail your resumes to
contactus@....

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What Does the Future Hold?

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Dear Friends,

Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes for a Happy and Prosperous New Year!!

Here are some interesting excerpts from "Transcription Technology Watch" -
an online column in Advance for Health Information Professionals Newsletter,
by Joe Weber, the inventor of Smartype and CEO of Lexicore.

<Twenty years ago, technologists predicted that medical transcription would
be replaced by speech recognition in 3 to 5 years. Five years later, they
uttered the same prediction. And that's the way it's been ever since-a
rolling 3- to 5-year window. So I'm a little reticent to make a forecast on
this front. But I will anyway. In 3 to 5 years, the need for traditional
transcription will be a small fraction of what it is today.>

<Nonetheless, this scary erosion of the transcription market will not occur
overnight. And it will be somewhat balanced by the fact that many
handwriting physicians will transition to dictation. But the time to make a
move is soon . if not now.

There are four ways to get into this game:

· Acquire a complete dictation system that incorporates speech
recognition.
· Integrate a speech-recognition server into your existing platform.
· Sign up with an application service provider (ASP) that provides a
total dictation/speech workflow.
· Transmit your voice files to a speech-recognition ASP, which will
send back draft reports.>

<Editing drafts from speech-recognition systems, although it draws on your
medical-language skills, is very different than typing out the entire
report. Some slow typists will be excellent editors. And some very fast
typists might find that the technology is not that helpful for them. The key
to productive editing seems to be the ability to multitask. The most
successful editors are able to make a correction while they continue to
playback the audio and watch for other errors in the text. And they can also
read ahead of the voice, to identify and correct some of the more obvious
errors coming up. Of course, not all physicians are qualified for speech
recognition. Those who are dysfluent, mumble and/or keep changing their
minds will have to wait for further advances in the technology. And they'll
continue to plague the MTs that haven't become editors. But for those
dictators that qualify-and the MTs who adapt gracefully to editing-it's a
very pretty picture!>

Cheers!

Maj (Dr.) Amit Chatterjee, SM
Strategist / Founder ~ mailto:MTIndia@...
MT India ~ http://mtindia.org
"The Community of MT Professionals"

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NEWS AND VIEWS :
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1) Outsource the Outsourcing

By now, nearly everyone understands the logic of offshoring. Why keep
noncore functions in-house when you can contract them out to lower-cost
providers overseas? Less obvious is how to put that understanding into
practice--that is, how do you actually create a global organization able to
operate across multiple time zones and tricky cultural and linguistic
divides? Few owners of fast-growing companies have the time or expertise to
find, let alone manage, contractors in the Philippines or India. And if it's
not done right, outsourcing can turn on you, leading to bigger problems than
those it was meant to solve. Hmmm. If only you could outsource the
outsourcing...

Vinay Gupta is a good example of this new kind of middleman. A veteran of
corporate America turned serial entrepreneur, Gupta believes there is no
reason small companies can't take advantage of the global economy just like
big ones. In 2003, the Ann Arbor, Mich-based entrepreneur launched Janeeva,
a company dedicated to that proposition.

In early 2004, a Janeeva salesperson paid a call on Joe Hymes, the executive
director of Business Health Services, which coordinates on-site medical care
for six occupational health centers in southeast Michigan. Hymes was under
intense pressure either to cut costs or cut jobs. One way to do the former
was to get a better rate on BHS's medical transcribing services, which were
currently being handled by a nearby contractor. Hymes knew that sending the
work overseas would be a lot cheaper. But he had no idea how to take the
first step.

The Janeeva salesperson told Hymes that in India, he could expect to pay
about 11 cents a word to transcribe BHS's doctors' notes and other medical
documents--five cents less than his current rate--and set out to broker a
perfect match. Two months later, Janeeva came back with a list of 12 vendors
and worked with Hymes to pick the right one. It also created a customized
computer system, so that finished transcripts arrive as PDF documents. When
a few technical glitches occurred early on, Janeeva stepped in to work with
the vendor to solve the problem.

Janeeva charges clients an up-front consulting fee--BHS paid about
$8,000--and also takes a 25% premium on top of the vendor's rate.
Nonetheless, BHS now pays 11.5 cents a word for transcribing--a savings of
about $7,000 a month--and Hymes did not have to cut a single job. Needless
to say, he's a big fan of what can be accomplished by offshoring. "How else
could I have trimmed $80,000 from my bottom line without lifting a finger?"
he asks.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051201/handson-global.html

2) Subsidized training for medical transcription slated in Cordillera

The Department of Labor and Employment Regional Office announced today that
the Medical Transcription Track of TRACES-BPO (Training-cum-Employment
Scheme for Business Process Outsourcing Industry) is now on stream.

This means that qualified people from the Cordillera can now undergo medical
transcription training for employment purposes at a fraction of the cost of
training in other training institutions. This is made possible because of
the sense of vision of the City Government under Mayor Braulio Yaranon, who
allowed the use of the Baguio City Convention Center as venue for the
training.

Pilipinas Data Contracts Corporation, the corporate sponsor and beneficiary
of this training programme, will sponsor and conduct the training. Whereas
other training institutions charge from P50,000 to P100,000 for a similar
training, the DOLE training scheme will only charge P3,000 for residents of
the Cordillera and P4,000 for non-residents.

http://www.pia.gov.ph/news.asp?fi=p051223.htm&no=25

3) Speech Recogition App to Be Included in Nightingale EMR Solution

Nuance Communications, Inc. announced that Nightingale has selected Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Medical to enable speech recognition within its
Nightingale electronic medical records solutions.

The new integration will enable Nightingale's customers to dictate directly
into the myNightingale EMR system, lowering administrative costs, errors,
and turnaround time typically associated with manually transcribing critical
medical records.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical 8 has built-in understanding for more than
300,000 words, and includes 14 specialty vocabularies, including general
medicine, pathology, radiology, cardiology and surgery disciplines.
Healthcare organizations can also easily add their own words to the solution
to create fully customized vocabularies. Care providers can take advantage
of voice-activated shortcuts, allowing a single word or phrase to
automatically populate fields within the Nightingale solution.

http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/speech-recognition/articles/159-speech-recogition\
-app-be-included-nightingale-emr-solution.htm

4) Oregon's Largest Private Physician Group Selects Allscripts EHR for New
Paperless Clinic

Allscripts announced that Bend Memorial Clinic (BMC) has chosen the
TouchWorks(TM) Electronic Health Record to automate and connect the group's
85 providers. Founded in 1946, BMC is the largest private, multi-specialty
physician group in Oregon serving communities across Central and Eastern
Oregon, and performing 220,000 patient encounters annually.

BMC providers using the Allscripts' Electronic Health Record (EHR) will have
instant access to a patient's medical record when and where they need it -
in the clinic, at the hospital or while on-call at home - without relying on
unwieldy, error-prone paper charts.

Allscripts' easy-to-deploy, physician-centric technology improves the
delivery of safe, cost-effective, high-quality care by automating common
tasks such as prescribing and refilling medications, ordering and viewing
tests, and documenting care. Physicians using the Web-based EHR reduce their
reliance on expensive transcription services and are freed from the costly
burden of creating and maintaining thousands of paper records
.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&ne\
wsId=20051213005659&newsLang=en

5) Tobago Centre launching in three weeks

Phase two of the $9 million Medical Transcription Unit at Signal Hill will
be launched in two weeks time following the successful recruitment of
trainees last week Friday at an Open House and Job Fair.

DirectOne, a subsidiary of the Gillette Group of Companies, which signed a
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in May, plans to launch an international
call centre with the recruitment of 100 Tobagonians.

However, many persons are asking questions about the viability of the
transcription unit since there were reports that the 60 transcriptionists
had been practicing on "dead files" for the last two years
.
http://www.thetobagonews.com/index.pl/article?id=5019838
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Thank you for your interest in MT India!

The MTIndia Team
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